The two-month payroll-tax-cut extension is the latest reminder that making policy for astoundingly short periods of time is embarrassing for government, confusing for businesses, and bad for everyone

Reuters

Every December, Congress faces a dwindling calendar and a pile of unfinished business. And every year, stuck somewhere deep in that pile, sits a packet of expiring tax provisions that show up again and again. The result: a second, quasi-permanent tax code that costs billions of dollars and slowly distorts the processes of building a coherent federal budget.

The hotly debated payroll-tax deduction, scheduled to return to its full 6.2 percent after Dec. 31, is just one of 67 expiring tax provisions--worth $300 billion or more--that are waiting to be swept into a behemoth package of renew-this-now legislation that President Obama signed just before his holiday vacation. Such last-minute measures have become a perennial problem as lawmakers fight over which tax programs to extend. The usual answer: all of them.

The culprit is the lawmakers' shrewd manipulation of the budget process. Increasingly, they prefer to impose a short time frame on tax provisions that would otherwise look too costly or controversial to append permanently to the nation's tax code. This way, they can offer popular benefits, such as a tax credit for research and development or a deduction for mortgage insurance, while valuing the cost over a year instead of a decade. Members of Congress can thus keep pet legislation on the books without having to justify the long-term expense. It also lets them play down a provision's true costs, because the Congressional Budget Office applies easier rules in estimating the costs of short-term programs.

But the unintended costs of this legislative evasion are mounting, according to Ryan McConaghy, the director of the economic program at the centrist Democratic think tank Third Way. Among voters, the repeated renewals create a perception of permanence. "Once you have a benefit going and it gets popular, it is always tough to roll back," McConaghy said.

Some of these annually renewed provisions now rank among the most expensive tax programs in the federal code. In 2010, lawmakers approved an $858 billion package to extend the Bush-era tax cuts and rein in the alternative minimum tax for another two years and also to continue a multitude of tax provisions--including a payroll-tax "holiday"--for one year. That was many times the cost of the largest permanent tax expenditure in 2008: $131 billion to exclude employer contributions from medical insurance premiums and care.

Governing for the short term only has long-term costs

Even worse, these supposedly temporary revenue measures obscure the U.S. fiscal outlook, because CBO number crunchers aren't permitted to take political reality into consideration when they make their projections. Every year, budget and deficit forecasts are adjusted and altered from a baseline that, by design, ignores benefits due to expire, even if everyone on Capitol Hill knows that Congress will keep those benefits alive. "According to the law, CBO identifies their baseline, but everyone still knows that [other changes are] going to happen," McConaghy said. "It muddies the budget picture."

The 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, notably, took full advantage of this polite fiction. The overwhelming cost of the combined rate cuts made them arithmetically problematic as a permanent change to the code. Republican leaders quickly restructured the legislation to include a mandated end of life. But under intense pressure from taxpayers who've grown accustomed to the lower rates, the tax cuts were renewed at the end of 2010 for another two years.

If these things keep happening, watch out. A 2010 study by economists Alan Auerbach of the University of California (Berkeley) and William Gale of the Brookings Institution, which the Congressional Research Service has cited, projected that public debt would approach 600 percent of GDP by 2085, assuming the continuation of current law, and 900 percent if the Bush-era tax cuts are made permanent.

Not that a temporary change in taxation is always, or inherently, a no-no. Trying something before making it permanent lets lawmakers--in theory, at least--test the effectiveness of a measure or address a near-term shift in the economy. Short-term stimulus efforts, such as the payroll-tax deduction, have been used to address the immediate needs of the struggling economy.

"The more transparent the cost of the programs are, the greater potential of Congress taking seriously the drain on the finances of the country," said Gerald Yin, a former chief of staff at the Joint Committee on Taxation. "I want [lawmakers] to see the numbers every day, every week" so they will reconsider the costs.

The problem is that the system has rarely worked that way in practice. "Temporary" has increasingly become code for "permanent" and "politically expensive." Most of the extenders that Congress approves every December have strong and vocal supporters who view the expiration of long-standing benefits as a de facto tax increase. Companies and individuals see the savings and favor deepening the deficit to losing their tax break, especially in a shaky economy.

The rising deficit is putting pressure on these temporary measures and forcing frequent battles over paying for the extensions. Debate over spending has made lawmakers scale back demands for how long each short-term program may be extended. And, in the case of the Bush tax cuts, lawmakers continue to use the recurrent expiration deadlines to secure expensive breaks for high-income earners.

Ducking the long-term implications of short-term tax decisions may be more of a problem next year. Nobody in Washington will have a chance to ignore the near-simultaneous expiration of the Bush-era tax cuts and the onset of statutory budget reductions now that lawmakers couldn't cut the federal deficit on their own. Not to mention the scheduled expiration of dozens of lesser-known but beloved tax goodies.

Add to that an election that could see both chambers of Congress and the presidency change hands and--conceivably--the path might be cleared for a fundamental reform of the federal tax code. That, experts say, would bring an end to the annual renewal of the tax code's "temporary" fixes. At least until Congress finds something else that it wants to fix.

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Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

There’s no way this man could be president, right? Just look at him: rumpled and scowling, bald pate topped by an entropic nimbus of white hair. Just listen to him: ranting, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, about socialism. Socialism!

And yet here we are: In the biggest surprise of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, this thoroughly implausible man, Bernie Sanders, is a sensation.

He is drawing enormous crowds—11,000 in Phoenix, 8,000 in Dallas, 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa—the largest turnout of any candidate from any party in the first-to-vote primary state. He has raised $15 million in mostly small donations, to Hillary Clinton’s $45 million—and unlike her, he did it without holding a single fundraiser. Shocking the political establishment, it is Sanders—not Martin O’Malley, the fresh-faced former two-term governor of Maryland; not Joe Biden, the sitting vice president—to whom discontented Democratic voters looking for an alternative to Clinton have turned.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

A controversial treatment shows promise, especially for victims of trauma.

It’s straight out of a cartoon about hypnosis: A black-cloaked charlatan swings a pendulum in front of a patient, who dutifully watches and ping-pongs his eyes in turn. (This might be chased with the intonation, “You are getting sleeeeeepy...”)

Unlike most stereotypical images of mind alteration—“Psychiatric help, 5 cents” anyone?—this one is real. An obscure type of therapy known as EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is gaining ground as a potential treatment for people who have experienced severe forms of trauma.

Here’s the idea: The person is told to focus on the troubling image or negative thought while simultaneously moving his or her eyes back and forth. To prompt this, the therapist might move his fingers from side to side, or he might use a tapping or waving of a wand. The patient is told to let her mind go blank and notice whatever sensations might come to mind. These steps are repeated throughout the session.